How The Supply Chain Planning Is An Integral Part Of Any Business

Wal-Mart is established by Sam Walton in 1962 and in 50 years, Wal-Mart successfully owned 10,000 retail outlets in 27 countries. Wal-Mart is designed as a discount store that applies everyday low pricing strategy. One of Wal-Mart strategic planning is open up large warehouse-style in low rent suburban area that close to major highways with the target market of blue collar shoppers. This decision also supported by rapid road infrastructure improvement. However the trade-off is none of the supplier willing to do a shipment to the store. Because of that Wal-Mart build their owned transportation

Success for many organizations depends on the firm’s ability to balance product and process changes while exceeding customer expectations for improved cost delivery and quality. In lieu of these issues firms have started to implement principles of supply chain management. Supply chain management mainly involves managing the flow of incoming materials, manufacturing operations, and downstream distribution has to be in alignment that is responsive to change in customer demands eliminating a surplus of inventory.

A supply chain is a net work of firms. Thus, each firm in the chain should build its own supply chains to support the competitive priorities of its services or products. Two distinct designs used to competitive advantage are efficient supply chains and responsive supply chains. Efficient supply chains work best in environments where demand is highly predictable. The focus of the supply chain is on efficient flows of services and materials keeping inventories to a minimum. The firm’s competitive priorities are low-cost operations, consistent quality, and on-time delivery. Responsive supply chains designed to react quickly in order to hedge against uncertainties in demand. Work best when firms offer a great variety of services or products and demand predictability is low. Typical competitive priorities are development speed, fast delivery times, customization, variety, volume flexibility, and top quality. Tables below show the environments and design features that best suit each design.

Supply chains manage the movement of products from the acquisition of raw materials through production and finally distribution to the end user. A properly designed supply chain can create many opportunities to drive down cost and increase revenue opportunities. In order to create a supply chain that is sustainable and flexible it is necessary to identify and align company goals and initiatives with the manufacturing and distribution of products.

Supply Chain Management is essential to successful movement of goods through a supply network. Many supply chains involves multiple processes and service providers. Most businesses operate in a just-in-time environment, managers must develop efficient, and cost effective ways of moving goods through the process to prevent loss revenue. Maria Hannah, Owner of The Clean Dog Pet Grooming Company provides pet grooming servicing and manufacturing of pet garments. This paper will examine Ms. Hannah’s responses to the Supply Chain questions as it relates to the business.

Effective supply chain management can provide an important competitive advantage for a business marketer, resulting in improved communication and involvement among members of the chain, increased motivation, and decreased costs. Tracking the movement of and demand for components used to manufacture a product across a variety of potential and actual suppliers, provides insight and the ability to respond instantly to shortages, surpluses, and changes in market conditions. It seeks to optimize production, decrease manufacturing time, minimize inventory, streamline order fulfillment, and reduce cost.

The globalization of organizations and more competitive forces have compelled more manufacturing businesses to improve an efficient supply chain planning for reducing the cost of supply chain. Planning of supply chain is being the critical component of business’ management. Supply chains have conventionally been split, being unsuccessful to assimilate the business utilities in the chain of logistics process. Such difficulties, as extended order lead times, high inventory costs, and struggle in answering proactive to real time variations, having lower profits and weak client goodwill that can be determined by putting together supply chain management schemes for transportation and warehousing. Supply chain can be explained as a combined practice where actually numerous different organizations individuals such as manufactures, retailers, distributors, and suppliers perform together in order to obtain raw materials, transform these raw materials into wanted ultimate products and supply these ultimate products to the vendors. The key methods in this combined procedure are the distribution, logistics, production planning and control. The production and planning steps are two of the most crucial parts to obtain worldwide optimization in supply chain management. And, this should be explained inside the integrated planning infrastructure. Interactive parts of supply chain included key parts such as purchase, production, logistics planning, sale, production and manufacturing

Supply chains represent the procurement, production and distribution activities of an organisation. Within a supply chain, these activities are viewed as linked and reliant on one another to produce the final outcome. It is believed that if one component of the chain fails, the whole chain is broken and product/service delivery goals will not be achieved.

Supply chain management (SCM) practitioners are often asked to discuss the top challenges they face in today’s business environment. Since change is constant, the challenges experienced today will at some point change over time. Over all, when taking into consideration all the challenges found in today’s SCM environment, one may wonder how it is possible to effectively and efficiently manage activities within a complex SCM. The answer lies within the decision making and problem solving processes covered this term. Since it is proven that multiple problems are best tackled one at a time, this research paper will evaluate and recommend a best solution as well as provide an execution timeframe and cost analysis of implementing a best approach to reduce the levels of complexity within a supply chain.

Foster, T., Sampson, S., Wallin, C., & Webb, S. (2015). Managing supply Chain and Operations: An Integrative Approach. New York, NY: Pearson.

Supply chain management is a main process in all kinds of companies. That’s because an optimized supply chain results in lower costs and a faster production cycle.

Pick any car model manufactured by a domestic auto maker. For example, consider the 2002 Ford Thunderbird. a. The supply chain for a car typically includes the following components: 1. Suppliers for raw materials 2. Suppliers for parts and subsystems 3. Automobile manufacturer (Ford, in this example). Within a company, there are also different departments, which constitute the internal supply

In most organizations, supply chain planning is a cross-functional effort. Functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, and operations traditionally specialize in

1) Increasing Number of Products and Services: With the increasing consumerism and competition among the organizations to attract more and more customers, customer has become more demanding and uncompromising. Companies are customizing products more and more to retain old customers and attract new customers, to fulfill increasing customer demand and gain competitive advantage over rival firms. This has led to the introduction of large number of new products with multiple SKUs which have very short life cycle. All these factors have led to increased complexity in supply chain which needs to be

Cost reduction is the number-one reason that companies initiate supply chain improvements. But there’s an even bigger opportunity here: Supply chain improvements are good for the bottom line, but they can be even better for the top line. Getting the supply chain right can give a company a tremendous competitive advantage, and sometimes that advantage is enough to overturn an entire industry structure.